The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (18 page)

“I can’t recall right now.”

She was asked if she’d ever discussed Stambaugh with either of the Lohmans.

“I don’t recall that.”

In regard to discussing Stambaugh with Marilyn Anderson, owner of the Mug-Shot and also a campaign contributor, Sarah said, “I don’t recall.” And she said the same concerning discussions with Steve Stoll: “I don’t recall … I don’t recall.”

Reading the transcript, I can’t help but think of the March 21, 1973, White House tape on which President Richard Nixon, discussing upcoming testimony in the Watergate hearings, said to his aide H. R. Haldeman, “Just be damned sure you say, ‘I don’t remember, I can’t recall.’ ”

What the deposition in its entirety makes clear is that Sarah’s main reason for firing Stambaugh was that he had not been sufficiently
deferential. In her termination letter she told him, “Your level of participation in staff meetings was disappointing and when you did speak you often did so in a disrespectful or condescending tone.”

“When you say disrespectful,” Stambaugh’s lawyer asked, “what do you mean by that.”

“I felt that he was disrespectful in his tone.”

“Can you tell me what leads you to that conclusion?”

“It was sometimes difficult to get any information out of Mr. Stambaugh … Instead of being given the courtesy of him offering the information, I had to continually ask … That to me is disrespectful.”

Later, she said, “He sat and stared at me in silence the vast majority of the time in our meetings.” When Sarah said she wanted more “community-based policing,” Stambaugh “expressed nonchalance.”

Stambaugh’s suit was eventually dismissed on grounds that Sarah was within her rights to fire him no matter how well he was performing his job because he served as an “at will” employee. Neither he nor Cindy, to whom he was married at the time, was required to testify about the extramarital affairs that Sarah accused him of having conducted.

In talking to me about his interactions with Sarah, Stambaugh is never disrespectful, but there are one or two occasions when I suspect him of expressing nonchalance. On the other hand, maybe he’s just being benign.

A COUPLE of days later, I drive to Eagle River, which is about two thirds of the way to Anchorage, to talk to another ex-cop. This one is Gary Wheeler, recently retired from the state police, where he served as head of Governor Sarah Palin’s personal security detail.

The sky remains gray: a week without sunshine since Nancy left. The mother grebe is still on her nest. I don’t know the incubation period for grebes, but I can tell from the increased volume and frequency of their squawks that both mama and papa grebe are getting impatient.

Gary Wheeler and his ebullient wife, Corky, are the kind of Alaskans who have you feeling like an old friend five minutes after you meet them. Gary, who was born in Anchorage, spent his whole career in the state police, directing the intelligence unit in Anchorage from 1989 to 1999. In 2000 he was transferred to the security detail for Governor Tony Knowles. Four years later he was named head of security for Governor Frank Murkowski. Sarah inherited him when she became governor in 2006.

“After eight years of dealing with politicians,” he says, “I can tell you one thing: they all love themselves and they all think that everybody else loves them, too.” Working for Murkowski, he saw quite a bit of Sarah during the gubernatorial campaign. “She comes across as very personable,” he tells me. “Give her a group of people and she’ll walk up and start shaking hands. In a campaign setting, she makes you feel like you’re somebody special, as if she’d like to know you personally, if only she had the time. It’s a neat trick, and not everybody can learn it.”

Offstage, as Wheeler quickly learned, she was considerably less engaging. “For the first couple of weeks, I picked her up at her house at six
AM
and drove her to her office in Anchorage. When she was done for the day, somebody else in the detail would drive her home. She’d ride in the back seat and spend a lot of time with her BlackBerrys or on the cell phone, so I didn’t try to make small talk. I’d say, ‘Good morning, Governor, how are you today?’ and she’d nod. When we got to the office I’d say, ‘Just call when you’re ready to go home.’ That’s all I said to her for two weeks.”

Nonetheless, Wheeler soon got a call from deputy chief of staff Mike Nizich informing him that “The governor does not want anyone speaking to her in the car.” Not even good morning? Wheeler asked. “Nothing,” Nizich said. “Do not speak. Period.”

We talk about Mike Wooten, the state trooper whom Sarah and Todd tried desperately to have fired after he and Sarah’s sister Molly
divorced. “I didn’t know about Wooten at that time,” Wheeler tells me. “I didn’t know how much she disliked the troopers.”

He learned soon afterward when both Todd and Sarah came to his Anchorage office to tell him that they wanted Wooten fired. “I didn’t even know the guy,” Wheeler says, “but the way they talked about him, he was a menace to society and they couldn’t understand why he still had his job, and they wanted me to do something about it.”

Personnel issues, of course, were not within his purview, but given Todd and Sarah’s insistence that he act, Wheeler called deputy state police commissioner Ted Bachman. He was told that there had been questions about Wooten’s performance, that there had been a departmental hearing, that Wooten had been briefly suspended, but that now he was back on the job in good standing and that the matter was resolved.

Wheeler shared this information with Todd. “That’s not what he wanted to hear,” Wheeler says. “He told me, ‘You don’t understand: I want him fired.’ I told him there was nothing I could do. The case was closed.” It was not closed, Todd said. It wouldn’t be closed until Wooten was gone. “ ‘I want you to be on the lookout for anything you can find out about the guy,’ Todd said, ‘and to report to me personally as soon as you hear anything I can use.’ ”

Wheeler is still unsettled by the memory. “They had it in for this guy. Todd would not accept that nothing could be done. They wanted something and Sarah was governor, so they felt they should be able to have it. For the next few months, every time I saw Todd he’d tell me something else Wooten had done. ‘He shot a moose without a license.’ ‘He had beer in his patrol car.’ ‘He tasered his stepson.’ I couldn’t understand why he was so obsessed. Then somebody told me: Wooten had been married to Sarah’s sister and it went bad. They were going to spend the rest of their lives trying to get back at him for that.”

A few months into her term, Sarah dispensed with Wheeler’s driving services. “She and Todd picked out a fifty-thousand-dollar Suburban
just so she could drive herself. What it came down to was she didn’t want us around. She didn’t want anybody to follow her to Nordstrom’s when she went shopping every day. Her first year in office, she must have bought a hundred pairs of sunglasses. Every day she’d have a new pair. Overall, she didn’t want anybody to know that she wasn’t coming in until ten
AM
and then leaving by three to go home.”

Wheeler could not help but compare Sarah’s work habits with those of her predecessors. “For six years I was with Murkowski and Knowles,” he says. “For them, the job wasn’t forty hours a week, it was eighty. Whatever you thought about what they accomplished, those two guys—one a Democrat, one a Republican—worked like hell, up to sixteen hours a day. For her, it was a part-time job.”

One of the problems with Sarah’s insistence on driving herself everywhere was that she was always getting lost. “There’d be a function in Anchorage,” Wheeler recalls, “and we’d be there waiting for her and—zoom!—her Suburban would go flying past. ‘There she goes,’ we’d say. ‘Let’s try to talk her back to earth.’ ”

But they couldn’t talk to her because she didn’t want to be talked to. So they’d text her, telling her she’d overshot her destination once again. “Her BlackBerrys, they were the closest thing to family to her, maybe closer,” Wheeler says. “Texting was how she related to the world.”

He takes a sip of the sweet tea Corky has served. “You know what she was? A housewife who happened to be governor. I’d fly cross-country with her many times and she’d spend the whole trip looking at
People
magazine, or one of the others like that. Knowles and Murkowski, they used those hours to work. For her it was like she was waiting for her appointment at the hair salon. She was really into celebrities. She could spend hours looking at pictures of them.”

In Juneau, Wheeler soon learned that he was as likely to find Todd in the governor’s office as Sarah. “He’d go up to the slope once in a while, but mostly he’d be in her office. He had his own desk in there and he’d do a lot of her stuff.”

“Would he sit in on meetings she had with her staff?” I ask.

“She didn’t have meetings. If she was meeting with anybody it was with
Vogue
magazine or
Vanity Fair
. We were supposed to get her schedule a day in advance so we could plan who would cover what, but most days there was nothing on her schedule. It was blank. We never knew what she was planning to do or what she did. Her staff would fill it in as best they could later, because they knew it wouldn’t look good to have day after day with nothing there.”

One day Mike Nizich told Wheeler that he wanted a trooper who’d been on the governor’s security detail for sixteen years returned to patrol immediately. Why? “Bristol and Willow don’t like him.”

Wheeler recalls accompanying Sarah to a National Governors’ Association meeting in Washington February 22–25, 2008. One morning he got a call from Sarah’s Juneau office telling him to bring her to a meeting at the Willard Hotel at 3:00
PM
.

“Who’s the meeting with?” he asked.

“John McCain.”

Wheeler was stunned. McCain was front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. “No,” he said to himself. “No way. He’s got to be smarter than that.”

The meeting lasted forty-five minutes. Wheeler stood outside the door. “She never said a word about what happened.”

By late February of 2008, Sarah presumably would have been seven months pregnant with Trig.

“She didn’t show,” Wheeler says. “I can’t say she wasn’t pregnant, but there was certainly no indication that she was. I remember at National Airport she went into the rest room to change from her nice clothes into jeans so she could wear jeans on the flight home. Did you ever see a woman six or seven months pregnant decide to wear tight-fitting jeans because they’re comfortable?”

Wheeler did not accompany Sarah on her trip to Texas when she said her water broke, precipitating the thirteen-hour “wild ride” back to Wasilla, where Trig was supposedly born.

“It was her first trip Outside when she didn’t want security. I had to call Texas so they could have their car and their troopers meet her at the airport. I have no idea why she didn’t want me along on that trip, but I can tell you this: if I’d been with her and if I’d known her water broke in Texas she would never have got on that plane to come back.”

I ask Wheeler what churches Sarah attended when she traveled. Were they always evangelical?

“She never went to church when I was with her. There were a number of times when we’d be out of state on a weekend. She never asked me to check on any services and she never attended any.”

I ask if he’d formed any impression about the degree of closeness between Sarah and Todd.

“Well, you can’t help but notice things like this: she and Todd never showed any affection for each other. I’d travel with Knowles and Murkowski and their wives, and you could tell that these were happily married couples. Sarah and Todd were like business partners. She could never even hold hands with him because she always had a BlackBerry in her hand.”

Of greater concern to Wheeler was Sarah’s propensity for putting old friends from Wasilla into jobs that were beyond their capabilities. “The people closest to her were all idiots, little guys in big guys’ shoes. They had no qualifications. They were a bunch of loyal little puppies. Kris Perry, Frank Bailey, Ivy Frye? These people had positions in state government? It was a joke. Listen, I know Sarah. She doesn’t belong leading people; she’s just not smart enough. She has no intellect and no interest in learning, because she thinks she already knows it all.”

Sarah’s paranoia made the deepest impression. “She was just so defensive all the time. Everybody was out to get her. This ran deep and it made her mean. Maybe she’d be mean anyway. But I’ll tell you one thing: she’s no mama grizzly; she’s a rabid wolf. Take a look at the snow: wherever she’s been, there’s a trail of blood in her wake.”

E
VEN IF she’d been permitted to do so, it’s unlikely that Sarah would have run for a third term as mayor. No matter how crazily Wasilla continued to grow, she felt she’d outgrown it. She wanted to perform on a larger stage, and she believed that God would put her there.

She also seemed to need new foes to vanquish. She would ask herself, says John Bitney, “Where’s the fight? That’s what she’s looking for. It gets her juices flowing. If there’s no win, she’s not interested. She’s a terrible manager, finds policy details too boring, but if you put the goalposts in front of her, you’d better get out of the way. She’ll chew your ass up.”

By November 2001 she was letting it be known that she planned to run for lieutenant governor the following year. It had been more than two years since her last electoral fight, and that one had never been a contest. Like her father before a hunting trip, she was hungry for fresh blood.

According to a number of people in Wasilla, Sarah’s domestic life was in tatters at the time. Time with friends—not that there were many friends—would degenerate into marital squabbles, raised voices, and frequent mutual threats of divorce. A recurring cause of conflict was Sarah’s inability or refusal to act as a mother to her children. She did so little that Todd had to rely on Debbie Richter, the
wife of his close friend Scott Richter, to help raise them. “Take care of the kids?” says John Bitney, who is now married to the former Debbie Richter. “She can’t, she won’t—whatever it may be—but she doesn’t. She just doesn’t. Todd has to take care of everything. And that’s the way it’s always been.”